Theresa May says “Enough is enough” Let us not forget that whilst in government she has cut 20 000 police and civilian intelligence analysts. She sacked 1500 HCHQ employees! She left border security in absolute chaos and then sacked thousands more border staff! Sacked Armed response units, explosive sniffer dogs and their handlers units! Those were May’s decisions as much as any other politicians. Time to own up – but they never will. May is right when she says “enough is enough” because “enough is enough” of her calamitous decision making and her Tory party’s never ending cuts and austerity! Which are now harming our security and costing the lives of innocent men, women and children .

According to Harold Pinter,Nobel Laureate, John Pilger, an Australian journalist living in England, “is fearless. He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is… I salute him.”

In an article dated 31.05.2017 he writes:

“The unsayable in Britain’s general election campaign is this. The causes of the Manchester atrocity, in which 22 mostly young people were murdered by a jihadist, are being suppressed to protect the secrets of British foreign policy.
Critical questions – such as why the security service MI5 maintained terrorist “assets” in Manchester and why the government did not warn the public of the threat in their midst – remain unanswered, deflected by the promise of an internal “review”.

The alleged suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, was part of an extremist group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, that thrived in Manchester and was cultivated and used by MI5 for more than 20 years.
The LIFG is proscribed by Britain as a terrorist organisation which seeks a “hardline Islamic state” in Libya and “is part of the wider global Islamist extremist movement, as inspired by al-Qaida”.

The “smoking gun” is that when Theresa May was Home Secretary, LIFG jihadists were allowed to travel unhindered across Europe and encouraged to engage in “battle”: first to remove Mu’ammar Gadaffi in Libya, then to join al-Qaida affiliated groups in Syria.

Last year, the FBI reportedly placed Abedi on a “terrorist watch list” and warned MI5 that his group was looking for a “political target” in Britain. Why wasn’t he apprehended and the network around him prevented from planning and executing the atrocity on 22 May?

These questions arise because of an FBI leak that demolished the “lone wolf” spin in the wake of the 22 May attack – thus, the panicky, uncharacteristic outrage directed at Washington from London and Donald Trump’s apology.

The Manchester atrocity lifts the rock of British foreign policy to reveal its Faustian alliance with extreme Islam, especially the sect known as Wahhabism or Salafism, whose principal custodian and banker is the oil kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Britain’s biggest weapons customer.

This imperial marriage reaches back to the Second World War and the early days of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The aim of British policy was to stop pan-Arabism: Arab states developing a modern secularism, asserting their independence from the imperial west and controlling their resources. The creation of a rapacious Israel was meant to expedite this. Pan-Arabism has since been crushed; the goal now is division and conquest. 

In 2011, according to Middle East Eye, the LIFG in Manchester were known as the “Manchester boys”. Implacably opposed to Mu’ammar Gadaffi, they were considered high risk and a number were under Home Office control orders – house arrest – when anti-Gadaffi demonstrations broke out in Libya, a country forged from myriad tribal enmities.
Suddenly the control orders were lifted. “I was allowed to go, no questions asked,” said one LIFG member. MI5 returned their passports and counter-terrorism police at Heathrow airport were told to let them board their flights.
The overthrow of Gaddafi, who controlled Africa’s largest oil reserves, had been long been planned in Washington and London. According to French intelligence, the LIFG made several assassination attempts on Gadaffi in the 1990s – bank-rolled by British intelligence. In March 2011, France, Britain and the US seized the opportunity of a “humanitarian intervention” and attacked Libya. They were joined by Nato under cover of a UN resolution to “protect civilians”.

Last September, a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee inquiry concluded that then Prime Minister David Cameron had taken the country to war against Gaddafi on a series of “erroneous assumptions” and that the attack “had led to the rise of Islamic State in North Africa”. The Commons committee quoted what it called Barack Obama’s “pithy” description of Cameron’s role in Libya as a “shit show”.

In fact, Obama was a leading actor in the “shit show”, urged on by his warmongering Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and a media accusing Gaddafi of planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew… that if we waited one more day,” said Obama, “Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
The massacre story was fabricated by Salafist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be “a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda”. The Commons committee reported, “The proposition that Mu’ammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence”.

Britain, France and the United States effectively destroyed Libya as a modern state. According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties”, of which more than a third hit civilian targets. They included fragmentation bombs and missiles with uranium warheads. The cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. Unicef, the UN children’s organisation, reported a high proportion of the children killed “were under the age of ten”.

More than “giving rise” to Islamic State – ISIS had already taken root in the ruins of Iraq following the Blair and Bush invasion in 2003 – these ultimate medievalists now had all of north Africa as a base. The attack also triggered a stampede of refugees fleeing to Europe.
Cameron was celebrated in Tripoli as a “liberator”, or imagined he was. The crowds cheering him included those  secretly supplied and trained by Britain’s SAS and inspired by Islamic State, such as the “Manchester boys”.

To the Americans and British, Gadaffi’s true crime was his iconoclastic independence and his plan to abandon the petrodollar, a pillar of American imperial power. He had audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would have happened, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to “enter” Africa and bribe African governments with military “partnerships”.
The fallen dictator fled for his life. A Royal Air Force plane spotted his convoy, and in the rubble of Sirte, he was sodomised with a knife by a fanatic described in the news as “a rebel”.
Having plundered Libya’s $30 billion arsenal, the “rebels” advanced south, terrorising towns and villages. Crossing into sub-Saharan Mali, they destroyed that country’s fragile stability. The ever-eager French sent planes and troops to their former colony “to fight al-Qaida”, or the menace they had helped create.

On 14 October, 2011, President Obama announced he was sending special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops were sent to South Sudan, Congo and the Central African Republic. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent was under way, largely unreported.

In London, one of the world’s biggest arms fairs was staged by the British government.  The buzz in the stands was the “demonstration effect in Libya”. The London Chamber of Commerce and Industry held a preview entitled “Middle East: A vast market for UK defence and security companies”. The host was the Royal Bank of Scotland, a major investor in cluster bombs, which were used extensively against civilian targets in Libya. The blurb for the bank’s arms party lauded the “unprecedented opportunities for UK defence and security companies.”
Last month, Prime Minister Theresa May was in Saudi Arabia, selling more of the £3 billion worth of British arms which the Saudis have used against Yemen. Based in control rooms in Riyadh, British military advisers assist the Saudi bombing raids, which have killed more than 10,000 civilians. There are now clear signs of famine. A Yemeni child dies every 10 minutes from preventable disease, says Unicef.
The Manchester atrocity on 22 May was the product of such unrelenting state violence in faraway places, much of it British sponsored. The lives and names of the victims are almost never known to us.

This truth struggles to be heard, just as it struggled to be heard when the London Underground was bombed on July 7, 2005. Occasionally, a member of the public would break the silence, such as the east Londoner who walked in front of a CNN camera crew and reporter in mid-platitude. “Iraq!” he said. “We invaded Iraq. What did we expect? Go on, say it.”
At a large media gathering I attended, many of the important guests uttered “Iraq” and “Blair” as a kind of catharsis for that which they dared not say professionally and publicly.
Yet, before he invaded Iraq, Blair was warned by the Joint Intelligence Committee that “the threat from al-Qaida will increase at the onset of any military action against Iraq… The worldwide threat from other Islamist terrorist groups and individuals will increase significantly”.
Just as Blair brought home to Britain the violence of his and George W Bush’s blood-soaked “shit show”, so David Cameron, supported by Theresa May, compounded his crime in Libya and its horrific aftermath, including those killed and maimed in Manchester Arena on 22 May.
The spin is back, not surprisingly. Salman Abedi acted alone. He was a petty criminal, no more. The extensive network revealed last week by the American leak has vanished. But the questions have not.
Why was Abedi able to travel freely through Europe to Libya and back to Manchester only days before he committed his terrible crime? Was Theresa May told by MI5 that the FBI had tracked him as part of an Islamic cell planning to attack a “political target” in Britain?
In the current election campaign, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has made a guarded reference to a “war on terror that has failed”. As he knows, it was never a war on terror but a war of conquest and subjugation. Palestine. Afghanistan. Iraq. Libya. Syria. Iran is said to be next. Before there is another Manchester, who will have the courage to say that?”

John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger

I do not usually copy whole articles but this is well worth reading. Jeremy Corbyn was ridiculed recently when he suggested that the last two decades or more of international terrorism can be traced back to ill conceived American foreign policy [from Afghanistan to Syria?]  supported by successive British governments. It confirms what I have long suspected.

A new friend recently asked if I lived in a castle. This made me realise how many people have disappeared from my list of contacts over the last 12 month’s and how many new friends have entered this domain, knowing little of the writer. This is a rambling explanation I wrote some 3 years ago when I first began this space.

I imagine there is a name for it: defending your own personal space. We walk through the busy shopping precincts, crowded with Christmas shoppers, we queue at the checkouts, each one of us defending that infinite gap of privacy from the people around us, trying to invisibly input our pin numbers! As a single diner, you would smile at the efforts that folk take in not occupying one of the three vacant seats at your table. The village pub, posh restaurant, theatre, soccer match, a moorland walk and most obvious of all, the beach – we huddle alone or in groups ‘defending’ our [dubious] ownership of a table, chair, area of sand and guarded on three sides by a multi coloured, ‘windbreak.’

Then an Englishman, invented the WWW. [Yes folks, another British invention that we have failed to capitalise on!]. The internet was soon available to us all. We could speak to people all over the planet – from our isolated dens/bedrooms. The screen and the electrical impulses, are as near as we allowed anyone to get close to us. I am amazed on reflection that I have been part of this revolution for some ten years now. Sadly, this complete freedom is being sadly eroded, the “system” now provides names to contact! The first rule in the distant past was that you created and sustained your anonymity. My first effort reflected the strange world I was entering – ‘Alien Dream’. In French you are aware they have masculine and feminine words, even in English ‘A D’ was deemed to be ‘feminine’. The problems are obvious!

My hobby is Genealogy, the history of my family. It will be plain to all that history is my favourite subject. History, is usually written by the main players, I find it more interesting to learn about how our ancestors coped with the social and economic problems of their days. The Hymn, ‘All things bright an beautiful’, says: “The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate.” Well my lot were both. All civilisations have protected family, in Barrows, Motte and Baileys and castles.

The Anjovian Empire, extended from the borders of Scotland to the Mediterranean Sea. Strategically placed hills, rivers and on estuaries loomed the power of the invader – Castles. Some large and significant while others were small and now, largely forgotton. Testimony to the rich accomplishments of England and France. They are foreboding structures. Haunted by the spirits of the past. My fascination with castles began when I heard the methods employed during sieges. Two of which were the hurling of rancid meat into the castle for the starving defenders to eat. The catapult like structure, bears the name of one line of ancestors – did they make them? Did they fire them? Another was the idea of the besiegers digging under the castle foundations and shoring the castle up with tarred wood. This was ignited, [later gunpowder was used], and the wall of the castle collapsed.  On school holidays my family would visit places like Conwy and Scarborough. They hung  huge carpets up on the walls to stop the draughts and called them tapestries. Castle stairs apparently spiral to the right almost universally. The reason for this is most people are right handed and hold their sword in this hand. An attacker running up the stairs is therefore hampered by the central supporting column of the staircase. The defenders however did not suffer such problems. They drank and caroused the days away between battles. The castle owner paid for all these festivities and this became a recognised method for the monarch of the day to stop his followers from becoming too rich, and powerful!

Sir William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, in 1766 made an impassioned defence of private homeowners against discretionary government searches. He enunciated on the right of an Englishman to be secure in his home: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail — its roof may shake — the wind may blow through it — the storm may enter — the rain may enter — but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of that ruined tenement.” In England, law is created by precedent – not a written constitution, so it is that this right, dates back to 1604, the year that Shakespeare presented Othello.            An individual named Semayne complained that his home had been broken into and his assets seized by the sheriff. The judgment that followed declared: ‘The house of everyone is his castle.‘ It went on to say, ‘That if a door is open, a sheriff may enter but that it is not lawful for the sheriff, on request made and denied, at the suit of a common person to break the defendant’s house.’ One 18th-century commentator wrote: ‘The law of England has so particular and tender a regard to the immunity of a man’s house, that it styles it his castle, and will never suffer it to be violated with impunity. For this reason, no doors can in general be broken open to execute any civil process; though, in criminal cases, the public safety supersedes the private.

This right, “Of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,” is enshrined in the constitution of the Commonwealth of United States. [Fourth Amendment]. Written incidentally from the works of French and English philosophers.

The above is a rather convoluted explanation of why my space is named as it is. So yes, I do live in a castle, my home IS my castle. As with most strategic edifices, it is built on a hill, overlooking the Trent Valley in Middle England. Unlike nearby Ashby Castle it has double glazing and the larder is always well stocked. [This latter fact comes from my genes who learnt to hoard during War time rationing!].

Whilst having had the title by document – it seemed that Glencairn was an appropriate name to use on the internet. I do not display a picture of the real Castle Glencairn for obvious reasons. As children we would play, King of the Castle and today I work on my computer and access the internet from my castle. It is the refuge from whence I travel around the world from this book lined room, isolated from, but close to you my friends the world over.

Laird. 2010

Behind one dead policeman are thousands of other public servants – all prepared to put their lives on the line to keep you, me and our families safe.

Perhaps those in power should remember, we vote to send our representatives to Westminster. Yet once in the corridors of power they forget. They continue to cut spending on essential services. They walk past the men and women who,as we have seen, are prepared to die to uphold peace and security in our streets.

Prayers and vigils will not return someone’s husband, wife son or daughter. Recognition of their value should NOT mean government cuts in staff numbers. It should NOT mean a wage freeze or paltry payrises of less than the cost of living .

The prayers should turn into meaningful demands for higher salaries for those who live on the front line every day of their lives.

They were alive once and dwelt among us. Now they are gone. It’s an old story, maybe the oldest there is, and it’s been told many millions of times. The year now ending has been no exception. The departed in 2016 include writers, actors, musicians and other ‘celebrities’.  We know who they were. Their departures, amply covered by the news media and have been marked, applauded or mourned, at length by the public.

The huge obituaries and the blanket media coverage belong primarily to those who became famous, or infamous, in life, or to those whose deaths were sufficiently lurid or shocking that they generated instant fame at the last minute. Some luminaries manage to achieve notoriety on both counts.

 Other lives also ended in 2016. Just as precious, just as loved by those who loved them deeply, and who love them still. Unnoticed unknown. That’s death, of course, and everyone knows it. Most people lead more circumscribed lives, ending in private deaths that are felt directly by only a few. Yet these factors do not diminish the worth of those lives or the pain engendered by their end.

 This time of year brings back thoughts of those who crossed my path and too soon passed on. Whose smile, wise words and affection live on in my memory. These few, and the many others may well be unsung, but that doesn’t mean they lived without song.